This paper documents disparities in cognitive development-as measured by a receptive vocabulary test-between children from households with high and low socioeconomic status (SES) in two different phases of childhood (before and after early school years) in four developing countries: Peru,...

We examine whether highlighting streaks encourages 4th to 6th grade students in Peru to increase their use of an online math platform and improve learning. Sixty thousand students were randomly assigned to receive messages that i) highlighted streaks, ii) provided personalized reminders with...

Using data from a randomized controlled trial in 300 public high schools in Peru, this paper studies the potential of school-based financial education programs for youth. The intervention improves students' and teachers' financial knowledge by 0.14 SD and 0.32 SD, respectively. The impact of the...

How much do schools differ in their effectiveness? Recent studies that seek to answer this question account for student sorting using random assignment generated by central allocation mechanisms or oversubscribed schools. However, the resulting estimates, while causal, may also reflect peer...

Diversity in gender identity and sexual orientation challenges traditional institutions, social norms, and gendered stereotypes. This may translate into greater levels of conflict in s ociety. Using data from 95 middle and high schools in Uruguay, we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the...

This paper presents evidence of the relationship between the disparity in the academic performance of boys and girls in Colombia and the country's excessively high school dropout rates. By using the OLS and trimming for bounds techniques, and based on data derived from the PISA 2009 database,...

Using administrative data from the urban Mexican Oportunidades program, this paper analyzes why poor households choose less education for their children, even when offered financial compensation for school attendance. Each school year, half of recipients forgo income for which they are eligible...

This paper designs and implements a field experiment that provides students from less advantaged backgrounds with individualized feedback on academic performance during the transition from middle to high school. The intervention reduces the gap between expected and actual performance, as well as...

Despite the renewed interest in technical education, only a handful of studies analyze its effect on academic outcomes. In this paper we apply a regression discontinuity design to oversubscribed technical high school tracks in Pernambuco, Brazil, to identify the impact of technical education...

This paper assesses the effectiveness of an intervention aimed at improving the reading skills of struggling third-grade students in Colombia. In a series of randomized experiments, students participated in remedial tutorials conducted during school hours in small groups. Trained teachers used...